Blass lost control in 1973, in what was such a classic case of the "yips’’ it is now often called the Steve Blass Disease.

Blass, unfortunately, never did recover.

"I never fully understood what happened,’’ he said. "But I was lucky in that it was toward the back of a career in which I already had done far more than I ever dreamed of. I tell people if that happened to me today, I would just go to Harvard Medical School and say, 'Fix me.' But that was a different era.’’